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Pivot3 Adds QoS Features to Hyperconverged Offerings

Taking advantage of its NexGen acquisition, Pivot3 is including data protection and scheduling capabilities in its portfolio of QoS software.

Pivot3 is expanding the quality-of-service capabilities of its hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio as the company continues to rapidly integrate the capabilities inherited through its acquisition earlier this year of storage vendor NexGen.

Pivot3 officials this week unveiled that they are including policy-driven data protection, application integration, scheduling and performance features to the company's Dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) software that will make it easier for enterprises to embrace hyperconverged infrastructures in their data centers.

"IT organizations are pushing to consolidate multiple application workloads onto common infrastructures to reduce their capital and operating expenses," Ahmad Chamseddine, vice president and chief operations officer at Pivot3, said in a statement. "Customers need guaranteed performance and data protection in line with their business priorities, which is why we're continuing to innovate with Quality of Service and hyperconvergence."

Businesses trying to manage such trends as cloud computing, data analytics, mobility, virtualization and the proliferation of mobile devices are looking for ways to simplify their increasingly complex data centers and drive down costs. That has driven demand in recent years for converged infrastructures, which offer tightly integrated compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software in a single appliance. The past couple of years have seen the rise of hyperconverged infrastructures, with a key difference being compute and storage functionalities merged into a highly virtualized server.

Further reading

Hyperconverged infrastructure is the fastest growing part of the converged infrastructure space, with IDC analysts forecasting the market to expand from $981.91 million last year to more than $4.7 billion in 2019. Vendors like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, EMC and Cisco Systems are expanding their portfolios to meet that growing demand, while companies such as Nutanix and SimpliVity offer software for hyperconverged environments.

Pivot3 has seen its own growth. In the first half of the year, officials said that revenue grew by 103 percent from the second half of 2015, and that the company added more than 400 customers and grew its workforce by more than 40 percent. In addition, the company in March raised another $55 million in financing.

Pivot3 for several years has been selling solutions with integrated compute and storage, and ramped up its capabilities when it bought NexGen in January, which brought accelerated flash array and QoS technologies. Pivot3 in June introduced the first product from the acquisition, the vSTAC SLX, combining its vSTAC hyperconverged solution with NexGen's flash arrays and QoS. In an interview this month with eWEEK, Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash said the company would work quickly to add to the QoS feature lineup, which becomes increasingly important as more applications are added to a single hyperconverged solution.

QoS software with greater automation and flexibility enables organizations to better manage the various competing interests of all those applications, Nash said.

"After you get 50 applications on one platform, you get the 'noisy neighbor' problem," he said.

The data protection QoS feature enables users to define policies that can specify snapshot, replication and retention, and apply those policies to volumes or groups of volumes, while the scheduling capabilities means organizations can set pre-defined schedules for performance and data protection policies, company officials said. The policies can change automatically at pre-determined times, which brings greater agility to the business as workloads and demands change.

The data protection QoS features integrate with Microsoft Windows application, and virtual machines from Microsoft and VMware.

The new QoS capabilities are available immediately with vSTAC SLX and N5 Flash Storage systems, officials said.